I wandered into the ongoing reason-versus-religion dispute and found the intransigence and cramped vision of both sides unhelpful to an often fragile faith.
“The world created in seven days is absurd,” claims one.
“Oh, yeah? Read the Bible,” retorts the other.
Where has reason—science—brought us? There is a Florida State University website that sketches an awesome portrait of creation. Beginning 10 million light years—94,608,000,000,000,000,000 kilometres—from Earth, our galaxy a tiny dot, we leap forward by powers of 10. Imagine a 100-yard football field. The first step takes us to the opposing 10-yard line, the next to the one-yard line, and the next to less than four inches from the goal line. On the seventh step, we’ve approached one light year, and our all-powerful sun appears as an infinitesimal star in the outer suburbs of the Milky Way. On our football field we’re less than four ten thousandths of an inch from the goal line.
NASA scientists, in The Life and Death of Planet Earth, suppose a clock to represent Earth’s lifespan, each hour representing a billion years. Life first appeared about 1:00 a.m., oxygen at 2:15 a.m., plants and animals at 4:00 a.m., and humanity less than two minutes ago. It is now 4:30 a.m. The expanding sun’s scorching heat will obliterate plant and animal life by 5:00 a.m.. At high noon, a hugely expanded sun will engulf Earth, blasting its atoms into space.
To the God-inspired men who wrote the Bible, Earth was the centre of the universe God created for us. Prophets and kings would have found it easy to imagine a sovereign atop the clouds ruling his dominions, sending emissary angels to encourage or rebuke wandering desert nomads. How dramatically this clashes with our “modern” perspective in which our dear green and blue planet is so infinitely tiny as to almost surpass imagination. And there, perhaps, is the key.
Perhaps our imaginations and the vocabulary we use to express the inexpressible are as tiny as our time and space in the universe, a place of mathematical logic and harmony that produce both the imponderable beauty that charms our minds and hearts, and the ferocity of exploding suns, earthquakes, and deadly cancer cells. From the less scientifically reliable evidence of our imaginations, in our poetry, painting, music and those rarest moments when, like Pilot Officer Magee, we touch the face of God, the universe we sense beyond words is also a place of infinite harmony and logic.
Physicist Stephen Hawking claims that the pending breakthrough of science will be to peer beyond the Big Bang, for then we will understand the mind of God. Ah, but who created God?
Well, we created Him in a multitude of shapes, languages and cultures. He is Lord, Yahweh, Allah, the Great Spirit and all the others. He is the X factor, a vast leap, a great conjecture, a monument to our infinitesimally limited comprehension in a cosmos the meaning and purpose of which we cannot ever hope to grasp. Yet it is clear that God’s will as taught to Christians by Jesus, to other believers by other voices, contains the seeds of a common human insight. We all see hope, faith, charity and love in nature around us and all too occasionally in human words, actions and art. The implication is that our best path to fulfillment on Earth is that most closely in harmony with, and reflected in, the universe we inhabit. There are no other demonstrable answers to the endless questions posed by poor puzzled humans since we first gazed at the stars.
That’s why they call it faith.
